Hungry City: Dhaulagiri Kitchen in Jackson Heights, Queens

Slide Show | Dhaulagiri Kitchen This restaurant’s disheveled setting is part of the charm.

Danny Ghitis for The New York Times

February 13, 2014

Hungry City

By LIGAYA MISHAN

“You won’t like it,” we are warned.

Nevertheless, the chef and owner of Dhaulagiri Kitchen, Kamala Gauchan, brings the dish to our table: dhedo, a brownish-gray mass of what looks like unbaked bread, slapped down on a round metal plate and circled by small bowls of curry and bright dabs of Nepali pickles.

Ms. Gauchan mimes pinching it with her fingers. On its own, the buckwheat-flour paste evokes sticky, partly solidified air. But this is not the way it is meant to be eaten, Ms. Gauchan admonishes; it requires curry, which is delicious but doesn’t quite soak in. Still, the appeal in this cruel season is clear: Dhedo expands in the stomach, almost calming in its blandness, fuel for a long winter.

The cooking of Nepal shares kinship with that of India, but the subcontinent’s brash flavors are tempered by the stark facts of life at altitude. Dhedo is a stand-in for rice, an expensive commodity in a country ranked among the poorest in the world. For the pilgrims who circumambulate Queens in search of lesser-known cuisines, the food at Dhaulagiri Kitchen is all the more genuine — and appealing — for being unpolished.

Note that the restaurant’s name appears nowhere outside this shack of a storefront in Jackson Heights, Queens. (Mysteriously, the address does not even register on Google Maps. I had to input the street number of the dental office next door.)

You may notice that the restaurant’s name appears nowhere outside this shack of a storefront in Jackson Heights, Queens.

Danny Ghitis for The New York Times

It is the one tranquil scene in an otherwise chaotic room. Foil trays of sel roti (a kind of deep-fried, misshapen doughnut made from pulverized rice, butter and sugar) jut out precariously from a shelf. A shrine to the Buddha is squeezed next to rows of instant ramen packages and spray cans of Pam. During one of my meals, a cook asked shyly if I would move so that he could reach a bin of flour. Before stepping on my chair, he carefully lifted the cushion off it.

Ms. Gauchan, a native of Katmandu, used to cook at the roomier and sleeker Himalayan Yak, over on Roosevelt Avenue. Now she makes do with essentially half a restaurant: A larger kitchen in back is dedicated to a chapati bakery, where two Indian women knead dough as Bollywood soundtracks trill in the background; a smaller setup in front handles hot dishes.

These include sukuti, beef jerky air-dried in-house and then stewed so the meat is strangely, and wonderfully, chewy and yielding at once; a mostly gentle potato curry with occasional strafes of fire; chicken curry whose meat Ms. Gauchan describes, with a chuckle, as “hard,” i.e. tough (intentionally so); a more pliant goat-stomach curry; and momos, nearly fist-size dumplings with thick, sagging skins that shed no juice when pierced.

The most efficient way to eat here is to order a thali, a set meal organized around a mound of rice or dhedo, including your choice of curry (watery but fervent) and a series of pickles that emphasize sour and bitter over sweetness. A compartmentalized box of dishes called, collectively, samay baji revolves around uncooked rice that has been beaten until flat and airy, its texture recalling Rice Krispies.

Or you could content yourself with snacks like sandheko waiwai, in which instant ramen-like noodles have been shattered and flung with jalapeño, red onion, scallion and cilantro and capped with a wedge of lime. It is hot, crunchy, verging on too salty and slightly ridiculous, which is to say, perfect.

The disheveled setting is part of the charm, as is Ms. Gauchan’s gruff warmth. At the end of a recent meal, she came to clear plates and looked down with a grin at the unfinished dhedo. “You didn’t like it!” she cried. She sounded triumphant.